Too many meetings

I am really looking forward to vacation. Only seven days to go now.

Part of why is that I'm in far too many meetings at the moment. They're worthwhile meetings, meetings in which things really get done or at least planning really happens. They're meetings designed to improve my work environment going forward, or to get us more money, or to get us more staff (and possibly thereby manage to employ friends of mine).

However, meetings just really hurt my work flow. The interruption throws me badly, makes it hard for me to concentrate and get things done, and breaks my day up into unproductive chunks where I mostly zone out reading my e-mail. Which in turn makes me depressed and makes me feel behind, and starts a bad cycle.

There isn't much I can do right now other than just hang in there, since a lot of the meetings are addressing short-term problems that will go away in the near future (hopefully). And each individual meeting isn't so bad. But I'm starting to feel cranky, swamped, and unfocused, and I've learned by now through experiment and observation that, even if I think I'm enjoying them, meetings do this to me.

(You get a whine instead of a book review tonight because, well, I was busy playing ping pong and now need to do some more work for my Debian maintainer application and then go to bed.)